“THERE’S A CAFETERIA UPSTAIRS,” Sean said to Jimmy. “Why don’t we go have some coffee?”
Jimmy remained standing over his daughter’s body. A sheet covered it again, and Jimmy lifted the upper corner of the sheet and looked down at his daughter’s face as if peering at her from the top of a well and wanting to dive in after her. “They got a cafeteria in the same building as a morgue?”
“Yeah. It’s a big building.”
“Seems weird,” Jimmy said, his voice stripped of color. “You think when the pathologists go in there, everybody else sits on the other side of the room?”
Sean wondered if this was an early stage of shock. “I dunno, Jim.”
“Mr. Marcus,” Whitey said, “we were hoping to ask you a few questions. I know this is a hard time, but…”
Jimmy lowered the sheet back over his daughter’s face, his lips moving, but no sounds leaving his mouth. He looked over at Whitey as if he were surprised to find him in the room, pen poised over his report pad. He turned his head, looked at Sean.
“You ever think,” Jimmy said, “how the most minor decision can change the entire direction of your life?”
Sean held his eyes. “How so?”
Jimmy’s face was pale and blank, the eyes turned up as if he were trying to remember where he’d left his car keys.
“I heard once that Hitler’s mother almost aborted him but bailed at the last minute. I heard he left Vienna because he couldn’t sell his paintings. He sells a painting, though, Sean? Or his mother actually aborts? The world’s a way different place. You know? Or, like, say you miss your bus one morning, so you buy that second cup of coffee, buy a scratch ticket while you’re at it. The scratch ticket hits. Suddenly you don’t have to take the bus anymore. You drive to work in a Lincoln. But you get in a car crash and die. All because you missed your bus one day.”
Sean looked at Whitey. Whitey shrugged.
“No,” Jimmy said, “don’t do that. Don’t look at him like I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not in shock.”
“Okay, Jim.”
“I’m just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. Say it rained in Dallas and so Kennedy didn’t ride in a convertible. Stalin stayed in the seminary. Say you and me, Sean, say we got in that car with Dave Boyle.”
“What?” Whitey said. “What car?”
Sean held up a hand to him and said to Jimmy, “I’m losing you here.”
“You are? If we got in that car, life would have been a very different thing. My first wife, Marita, Katie’s mother? She was so beautiful. She was regal. You know the way some Latin women can be? Gorgeous. And she knew it. If a guy wanted to approach her, he better have some big fucking balls on him. And I did. I was King Shit at sixteen. I was fearless. And I did approach her, and I did ask her out. And a year later—Christ, I was seventeen, a fucking child—we got married and she was carrying Katie.”
Jimmy walked around his daughter’s body in slow, steady circles.
“Here’s the thing, Sean—if we’d gotten in that car, been driven off to God knows where and had God knows what done to us by two ass-fucking freaks for four days when we were, what, eleven?—I don’t think I’d have been so ballsy at sixteen. I think I would have been a basket case, you know, stoked on Ritalin or whatever. I know I never would have had what it took to ask out a woman as haughty-gorgeous as Marita. And so we never would have had Katie. And Katie, then, never would have been murdered. But she was. All because we didn’t get in that car, Sean. You see what I’m saying?”
Jimmy looked at Sean like he was waiting for a confirmation, but a confirmation of what Sean didn’t have a clue. He looked as if he needed to be absolved—absolved of not getting in that car as a boy, absolved of fathering a child who would be murdered.
Sometimes during a jog, Sean found himself back on Gannon Street, standing on the spot in the middle of the street where he and Jimmy and Dave Boyle had rolled around fighting, then looked up to see that car waiting for them. Sometimes Sean could still smell the odor of apples that had wafted from the car. And if he turned his head real quick, he could see Dave Boyle in the backseat of that car as it reached the corner, looking back at them, trapped and receding from view.
It had occurred to Sean once—on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical—that maybe they had gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they’d become if they ever escaped and grew up.
The thing about that idea was that even though Sean would have expected it to be the first casualty of a night’s drinking, it had remained lodged in his brain like a stone in the sole of his shoe.
And so occasionally he found himself on Gannon Street in front of his old house, catching glimpses of the receding Dave Boyle out of the corner of his eye, the odor of apples filling his nostrils, thinking, No. Come back.
He met Jimmy’s plaintive glare. He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell him that he had also thought about what would have happened if they’d climbed in that car. That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window. He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door. He wanted to tell him he hadn’t truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character.
But they were in a morgue with Jimmy’s daughter lying on a steel table in between them and Whitey’s pen poised over paper, so all Sean said to the plea in Jimmy’s face was: “Come on, Jim. Let’s go get that coffee.”
ANNABETH MARCUS, in Sean’s opinion, was one tough goddamned woman. She sat in a cold, late-Sunday, municipal cafeteria with its warmed-over, cellophane-’n’-steam smell, seven stories above a morgue, talking about her stepdaughter with cold, municipal men, and Sean could tell it was killing her, yet she refused to crack. Her eyes were red, but Sean knew after a few minutes that she wouldn’t weep. Not in front of them. No fucking way.
As they talked, she had to stop for breath a few times. Her throat would close up in midsentence, as if a fist wormed its way through her chest, pressing against her organs. She’d place a hand on her chest and open her mouth a little wider and wait until she’d gotten enough oxygen to continue.
“She came home from working at the store at four-thirty on Saturday.”
“What store was that, Mrs. Marcus?”
She pointed at Jimmy. “My husband owns Cottage Market.”
“On the corner of East Cottage and Bucky Ave.?” Whitey said. “Best damn coffee in the city.”
Annabeth said, “She came in and hopped in the shower. She came out and we had dinner—wait, no, she didn’t eat. She sat with us, talked to the girls, but she didn’t eat. She said she was having dinner with Eve and Diane.”
“The girls she went out with,” Whitey said to Jimmy.
Jimmy nodded.
“So, she didn’t eat…” Whitey said.
Annabeth said, “But she hung out with the girls, our girls, her sisters. And they talked about the parade next week and Nadine’s First Communion. And then she was on the phone in her room for a bit, and then, about eight, she left.”
“Do you know who she talked to on the phone?”
Annabeth shook her head.
“The phone in her room,” Whitey said. “Private line?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have any objections if we subpoenaed the phone company records to that line?”
Annabeth looked at Jimmy and Jimmy said, “No. No objections.”
“So she left at eight. As far as you know to meet with her friends, Eve and Diane?”
“Yes.”
“And you were still at the store at this time, Mr. Marcus?”
“Yeah. I did swing shift on Saturday. Twelve to eight.”
Whitey flipped a page in his notebook and gave them both a small smile. “I know this is tough, but you’re doing great.”
Annabeth nodded and turned to her husband. “I called Kevin.”
“Yeah? You talk to the girls?”
“I talked to Sara. I just told her we’d be home soon. I didn’t tell her anything else.”
“She ask about Katie?”
Annabeth nodded.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I just told her we’d be home soon,” Annabeth said, and Sean heard a small crack in her voice on “soon.”
She and Jimmy looked back at Whitey and he gave them another small, calming smile.
“I want to assure you—and this comes down all the way from the big office in City Hall—that this case is top priority. And we won’t make mistakes. Trooper Devine here was assigned because he’s a friend of the family and our boss knows that that’ll make him work it that much harder. He’s going to be with me every step of the way, and we will find the man responsible for harming your daughter.”
Annabeth gave Sean a quizzical look. “Friend of the family? I don’t know you.”
Whitey scowled, thrown off his game.
Sean said, “Your husband and I were friends, Mrs. Marcus.”
“Long time ago,” Jimmy said.
“Our fathers worked together.”
Annabeth nodded, still a bit confused.
Whitey said, “Mr. Marcus, you spent a good part of Saturday with your daughter at the store. Correct?”
“I did and I didn’t,” Jimmy said. “I was mostly in back. Katie worked the registers up front.”
“But do you remember anything out of the ordinary? Was she acting odd? Tense? Fearful? Did she have a confrontation with a customer maybe?”
“Not while I was there. I’ll give you the number of the guy who worked with her in the morning. Maybe something happened before I got in that he remembers.”
“Appreciate that, sir. But while you were there?”
“She was herself. She was happy. Maybe a little…”
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
“Sir, the littlest thing is something right now.”
Annabeth leaned forward. “Jimmy?”
Jimmy gave them all an embarrassed grimace. “It’s nothing. It was…I look up from my desk at one point and she’s standing in the doorway. Just standing there, sipping a Coke through a straw, and looking at me.”
“Looking at you.”
“Yeah. And for a second, she looked like she did this one time when she was five and I was going to leave her in the car for just a sec while I ran into the drugstore. That time, right, she burst out crying because I’d just gotten back from prison and her mother had just died and I think, back then, she thought that every time you left her, even for a second, you weren’t going to come back. So she’d get this look, right? I mean, whether she ended up crying or not, she’d get this look on her face like she was preparing herself to never see you again.” Jimmy cleared his throat and let out a long sigh that widened his eyes. “Anyway, I hadn’t seen that look in a few years, maybe seven or eight, but for a few seconds on Saturday, that’s how she was looking at me.”
“Like she was preparing herself to never see you again.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy watched Whitey write that in his report pad. “Hey, don’t make too much of it. It was just a look.”
“I’m not making anything out of it, Mr. Marcus, I promise. It’s just info. That’s what I do—I collect pieces of info until two or three pieces fit together. You say you were in prison?”
Annabeth said, “Jesus,” very softly, and shook her head.
Jimmy leaned back in his chair. “Here we go.”
“I’m just asking,” Whitey said.
“You’d do the same if I’d said I worked at Sears fifteen years ago, right?” Jimmy chuckled. “I did time for a robbery. Two years at Deer Island. You write that in your notebook. That piece of information going to help you catch the guy who killed my daughter, Sergeant? I mean, I’m just asking.”
Whitey shot a glance Sean’s way.
Sean said, “Jim, no one means to offend anyone here. Let’s just let it pass, get back to the point.”
“The point,” Jimmy said.
“Outside of that look Katie gave you,” Sean said, “was there anything else out of the ordinary you can remember?”
Jimmy took his convict-in-the-yard stare off Whitey and drank some coffee. “No. Nothing. Wait—this kid, Brendan Harris—But, no, that was this morning.”
“What about him?”
“He’s just a kid from the neighborhood. He came in today and asked if Katie was around like he’d been expecting to see her. But they barely knew each other. It was just a little strange. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Whitey wrote the kid’s name down anyway.
“Could she have been dating him maybe?” Sean said.
“No.”
Annabeth said, “You never know, Jim…”
“I know,” Jimmy said. “She wouldn’t date that kid.”
“No?” Sean said.
“No.”
“Why you so sure?”
“Hey, Sean, what the fuck? You’re going to grill me?”
“I’m not grilling you, Jim. I’m just asking how you could be so sure your daughter wasn’t seeing this Brendan Harris kid.”
Jimmy blew air out of his mouth and up at the ceiling. “A father knows. Okay?”
Sean decided to let it ride for now. He tossed it back to Whitey with a nod.
Whitey said, “Well, what about that? Who was she seeing?”
“No one at the moment,” Annabeth said. “Far as we knew.”
“How about ex-boyfriends? Anyone who might be holding a grudge? Guy she dumped or something?”
Annabeth and Jimmy looked at each other and Sean could feel it between them—a suspect.
“Bobby O’Donnell,” Annabeth said eventually.
Whitey placed his pen on his report pad, stared across the table at them. “We talking about the same Bobby O’Donnell?”
Jimmy said, “I dunno. Coke dealer and pimp? About twenty-seven?”
“That’s the guy,” Whitey said. “We got him pegged for a lot of shit went down in your neighborhood the past two years.”
“And yet you haven’t charged him with anything.”
“Well, first off, Mr. Marcus, I’m State Police. If this crime hadn’t happened in Pen Park, I wouldn’t even be here. East Bucky is, for the most part, under City jurisdiction, and I can’t speak for the City cops.”
Annabeth said, “I’ll tell that to my friend Connie. Bobby and his friends blew up her flower shop.”
“Why?” Sean asked.
“Because she wouldn’t pay him,” Annabeth said.
“Pay him to do what?”
“Not blow up her fucking flower shop,” Annabeth said, and took another sip of coffee, Sean thinking it again—this woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.
“So your daughter,” Whitey said, “was dating him.”
Annabeth nodded. “Not for long. A few months, yeah, Jim? It ended back in November.”
“How’d Bobby take it?” Whitey asked.
The Marcuses exchanged glances again, and then Jimmy said, “There was a beef one night. He came to the house with his guard dog, Roman Fallow.”
“And?”
“And we made it clear they should leave.”
“Who’s we?”
Annabeth said, “Several of my brothers live in the apartment above us and the apartment below. They’re protective of Katie.”
“The Savages,” Sean told Whitey.
Whitey placed his pen on the pad again and pressed his index and thumb tips against the skin at the corners of his eyes. “The Savage brothers.”
“Yes. Why?”
“All due respect, ma’am, I’m a bit worried this could shape up into something ugly.” Whitey kept his head down, kneading the back of his neck now. “I mean absolutely no offense here, but—”
“That’s usually what someone says before they’re about to say something offensive.”
Whitey looked up at her with a surprised smile. “Your brothers, you must know, have some reputations themselves.”
Annabeth met Whitey’s smile with a hard one of her own. “I know what they are, Sergeant Powers. You don’t have to dance around it.”
“A friend of mine in Major Crimes told me a few months back that O’Donnell was making noise about moving into loan-sharking and heroin. Both of which, I’m told, are exclusively Savage territory.”
“Not in the Flats.”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“Not in the Flats,” Jimmy said, his hand on his wife’s. “Means they don’t do that shit in their own neighborhood.”
“Just someone else’s,” Whitey said, and let that lie on the table for a bit. “In either case, that would leave a vacuum in the Flats. Right? An exploitable vacuum. Which, if my info is correct, is what Bobby O’Donnell has been planning to exploit.”
“And?” Jimmy said, rising up a bit in his seat.
“And?”
“And what does this have to do with my daughter, Sergeant?”
“Everything,” Whitey said, his arms spreading wide. “Everything, Mr. Marcus, because all either side needed was one little excuse to go to war. And now they have it.”
Jimmy shook his head, a bitter grin twitching at the edges of his mouth.
“Oh, you don’t think so, Mr. Marcus?”
Jimmy raised his head. “I think my neighborhood, Sergeant, is going to disappear soon. And crime’s going to go with it. And it won’t be because of the Savages or the O’Donnells or you guys bucking up against them. It’ll be because interest rates are low and property taxes are getting high and everyone wants to move back to the city because the restaurants in the suburbs suck. And these people moving in, they aren’t the kind that need heroin or six bars per block or ten-dollar blow jobs. Their lives are fine. They like their jobs. They got futures and IRAs and nice German cars. So when they move in—and they’re coming—crime and half the neighborhood will move out. So I wouldn’t worry much about Bobby O’Donnell and my brothers-in-law going to war, Sergeant. War for what?”
“For the right now,” Whitey said.
Jimmy said, “You honestly think O’Donnell killed my daughter?”
“I think the Savages might consider him a suspect. And I think someone needs to talk them out of that kind of thinking until we’ve had time to do our jobs.”
Jimmy and Annabeth sat on the other side of the table, Sean trying to read their faces but getting nothing back.
“Jimmy,” Sean said, “without distractions, we can close this case fast.”
“Yeah?” Jimmy said. “I got your word on that, Sean?”
“You do. And close it clean, too, so nothing comes back on us in court.”
“How long?”
“What?”
“How long would you say it’ll take you to put her killer in jail?”
Whitey held up a hand. “Wait a second—are you bargaining with us, Mr. Marcus?”
“Bargaining?” Jimmy’s face had that convict’s deadness to it again.
“Yeah,” Whitey said. “Because I’m perceiving—”
“You’re perceiving?”
“—an aspect of threat to this conversation.”
“Really?” All innocence now, but the eyes still dead.
“Like you’re giving us a deadline,” Whitey said.
“Trooper Devine pledged that he’d find my daughter’s killer. I’m just asking in what sort of time frame he thinks this will happen.”
“Trooper Devine,” Whitey said, “is not in charge of this investigation. I am. And we will depth-charge whoever did this, Mr. and Mrs. Marcus. What I don’t need is anyone getting it in their head that our fear of a war between the Savage and O’Donnell crews can be used as some sort of leverage against us. I think that, I’ll arrest them all on public nuisance charges and lose the paperwork until this is over.”
A couple of janitors walked past them, trays in hand, the soggy food on top letting off a gray steam. Sean felt the air in the place grow staler, the night close in around them.
“So, okay,” Jimmy said with a bright smile.
“Okay, what?”
“Find her killer. I won’t stand in your way.” He turned to his wife as he stood and offered her his hand. “Honey?”
Whitey said, “Mr. Marcus.”
Jimmy looked down at him as his wife took his hand and stood.
“There’ll be a trooper downstairs to drive you home,” Whitey said, and reached into his wallet. “If you think of anything, give us a call.”
Jimmy took Whitey’s card and placed it in his back pocket.
Now that she was standing, Annabeth looked a lot less steady, like her legs were filled with liquid. She squeezed her husband’s hand and her own whitened.
“Thank you,” she whispered to Sean and Whitey.
Sean could see the ravages of the day finding her face and body now, beginning to drape her. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she’d look like when she was much older—a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she’d never asked for.
Sean had no idea where the words came from. He wasn’t even aware he was speaking until he heard the sound of his voice enter the cold cafeteria:
“We’ll speak for her, Mrs. Marcus. If that’s okay, we’ll do that.”
Annabeth’s face crinkled momentarily, and then she sucked at the air and nodded several times, wavering slightly against her husband.
“Yes, Mr. Devine, that’s okay. That’s fine.”
DRIVING BACK across the city, Whitey said, “What’s this car business?”
Sean said, “What?”
“Marcus said you guys almost got in some car when you were kids.”
“We…” Sean reached up by the dashboard and adjusted the side-view mirror until he could see the stream of headlights glowing behind them, fuzzy yellow dots bouncing slightly in the night, shimmying. “We, shit, well, there was this car. Me and Jimmy and a kid named Dave Boyle were playing out in front of my house. We were, like, eleven. And anyway, this car came up the street and took Dave away.”
“An abduction?”
Sean nodded, keeping his eyes on those shimmying yellow lights. “Guys pretended to be cops. They convinced Dave to get in the car. Jimmy and me didn’t. They had Dave four days. He managed to escape. Lives in the Flats now.”
“They catch the guys?”
“One died, the other got busted about a year later, went the noose route in his cell.”
“Man,” Whitey said, “I wish there was an island, you know? Like in that old Steve McQueen movie where he was supposed to be French and everyone had an accent but him? He’s just Steve McQueen with a French name. Jumps off the cliff at the end with the raft made of coconuts? You ever see that?”
“No.”
“Good movie. But, like, if they had an island just for baby-rapers and chicken hawks? Just airlift food in a few times a week, fill the water with mines. No one gets off. First-time offenders, fuck you, you get life on the island. Sorry, fellas, just can’t risk you getting out and poisoning someone else. ’Cause it’s a transmittable disease, you know? You get it ’cause someone did it to you. And you go and pass it on. Like leprosy. I figure we put ’em all on this island, less chance they can pass it on. Each generation, we have fewer and fewer of them. A few hundred years, we turn the island into Club Med or something. Kids hear about these freaks the way they hear about ghosts now, as something we’ve, I dunno, evolved beyond.”
Sean said, “Shit, Sarge, what’re you, deep all of a sudden?”
Whitey grinned and turned onto the expressway ramp.
“Your buddy Marcus,” he said. “Moment I laid eyes on him, I knew he’d done time. They never lose that tension, you know? In their shoulders mostly. Spend two years watching your own back, every second of every day, the tension’s gotta settle somewhere.”
“He just lost his daughter, man. Maybe that’s what settled in his shoulders.”
Whitey shook his head. “No. That’s in his stomach right now. You see how he kept grimacing? That’s the loss sitting in his stomach, turning it to acid. Seen it a million times. The shoulders, though, that’s prison.”
Sean turned from the rearview, watched the lights on the other side of the highway for a bit. They came in their direction like bullet eyes, streaked past them like hazy ribbons, blurring into one another. He felt the city girded all around them, with its high-rises and tenements and office towers and parking garages, arenas and nightclubs and churches, and he knew that if one of those lights went out, it wouldn’t make any difference. And if a new light came on, no one would notice. And yet, they pulsed and glowed and shimmied and flared and stared at you, just like now—staring in at his and Whitey’s own lights as they blipped past on the expressway, just one more set of red and yellow lights streaking along amid a current of red and yellow lights that blipped, blipped, blipped through an unremarkable Sunday dusk.
Toward where?
Toward the extinguished lights, dummy. Toward the shattered glass.
AFTER MIDNIGHT, once Annabeth and the girls had finally gone to sleep and Annabeth’s cousin Celeste, who’d come by as soon as she’d heard, had started dozing on the couch, Jimmy went downstairs and sat on the front porch of the three-decker he shared with the Savage brothers.
He brought Sean’s glove with him and he slipped it over his hand even though he couldn’t get his thumb in there and the heel of the glove stopped in the middle of his palm. He sat looking out at the four lanes of Buckingham Avenue and tossed a ball into the webbing, the soft thwack of leather against leather calming something in him.
Jimmy had always liked sitting out here at night. The storefronts across the avenue were closed and mostly dark. At night, a hush fell over an area where commercial business was conducted during the day, and it was a hush unlike any other. The noise that normally ruled the daytime wasn’t gone, it was merely sucked up, as if into a pair of lungs, and then held, waiting to be expelled. He trusted that hush, warmed to it, because it promised the return of the noise, even as it held it captive. Jimmy couldn’t imagine living somewhere rural, where the hush was the noise, where silence was delicate and shattered upon touch.
But he did like this hush, this rumbling stillness. Up until now, the evening had seemed so noisy, so violent with voices and the weeping of his wife and daughters. Sean Devine had sent over two detectives, Brackett and Rosenthal, to search Katie’s room with embarrassed eyes cast downward, whispering to Jimmy their apologies as they searched drawers and under the bed and mattress, Jimmy wishing they’d just speed it up, stop fucking talking to him. In the end, they didn’t find anything unusual outside of seven hundred dollars in new bills in Katie’s sock drawer. They’d shown it to Jimmy along with her bank book—stamped “Closed”—the final withdrawal having been made Friday afternoon.
Jimmy had no answer for them. It was a surprise to him. But given all the other surprises of the day, it had very little effect. It just added to the general numbness.
“We can kill him.”
Val stepped out onto the porch and handed Jimmy a beer. He sat down beside him, his feet bare on the steps.
“O’Donnell?”
Val nodded. “I’d like to. You know, Jim?”
“You think he killed Katie.”
Val nodded. “Or had someone else do it. Don’t you? Her girlfriends sure thought so. They say Roman rolled up on them in a bar, threatened Katie.”
“Threatened?”
“Well, gave her some shit anyway, like she was still O’Donnell’s girl. Come on, Jimmy, it had to be Bobby.”
Jimmy said, “I don’t know that for sure yet.”
“What’ll you do when you do know?”
Jimmy put the baseball glove on the step below him and opened his beer. He took a long, slow drink from it. “I don’t know that, either.”